1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, generally, to systems and methods for processing and reporting information and data, such as business information, and more particularly, to systems, software, hardware, products, and processes for use by businesses, individuals and other organizations to collect, process, distribute, analyze and visualize information, including, but not limited to, business intelligence, data visualization, data warehousing, and data mining.
2. Discussion of the Background
Business analytics is focused on deriving actionable intelligence from transactional or other process automation systems, content distribution systems, and databases. The proliferation in the use of such transactional and other process automation and content delivery systems has created a substantial need for efficient and effective analytical systems. The Internet has emerged as a global medium that allows millions of users to more efficiently obtain information, communicate, and conduct business. As Internet usage has grown, companies have increasingly come to rely on Web-based systems, Internet and intranet sites as important business channels.
Through the Internet, a company can establish and maintain large numbers of direct relationships and reduce costs in traditional infrastructures such as retail outlets, distribution networks, and sales personnel. Both traditional and Web-based companies use the Internet to communicate marketing and other important information to customers, and manage relationships with vendors, partners, and employees. Increasingly, companies are using the Internet to generate revenue through the sale of goods and services, as well as through the sale of advertising.
However, managing, evaluating, monitoring and optimizing online transactions, and providing for personalized customer relationships are highly complex processes. In part, as a consequence of the Internet technology gap between what works in theory and what works in practice, a crisis in web usability exists as evidenced by numerous research studies:
Forrester research revealed that:                50% of potential online sales are lost when online users cannot find what they are looking for;        40% of online users do not return to a site when their first visit resulted in a negative experience; and        75% of all shopping carts are abandoned.Research by Jakob Nielsen shows that:        Worldwide, the cost of poor intranet usability will grow to about $100 billion by the year 2001; and        90% of commercial Web sites have poor usability.        
This research data provides an objective view on the seriousness of the usability crisis. It is becoming increasingly clear to companies that their web-based systems are not as effective as they need to be, and that current analytical tools are not delivering the information required to address these problems.
Companies pay millions of dollars to operate their e-business web sites, yet have little or no direct visibility into their operations. Reporting systems for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are woefully inadequate in giving business managers cogent information in time to make changes. Companies buy millions of dollars of software and services for business systems that they cannot monitor or optimize at a business level, and information is either not delivered to executives or it is delivered in a form that lacks continuity, interactivity, timeliness and transparency. For all of the dollars that have been spent on automating business systems, no one has been able to provide to the person who is paying for the systems an ability to interactively visualize or analyze the, operations of the system and optimize return on their investment. These and other deficiencies divert millions, if not billions, of dollars from the bottom lines of companies worldwide.
Millions of web sites have been developed by businesses, however many of them are ineffective or sub-effective, and some are even damaging to their enterprises. Managers and executives have little visibility into the ongoing operations of their sites, regardless of their purpose. In many cases, millions of dollars have been spent to build these sites, many of which are intended to support business critical, if not mission critical, business processes, such as sales and distribution. Yet executives and managers do not have the tools to stay on top of their operations, let alone optimize them. In the best of cases, managers get reports once a week or once a month that give them a snapshot of their site's performance. Put plainly, the people with checkbooks, decision-making authority, financial experience and authority are locked out of the site optimization process, and are expected to act blindly with poor information, through other people.
With the advent of the Internet, companies, their customers, vendors, partners, distribution channels, and employees now have the means to more efficiently share information, automate business processes, and conduct business on a global scale. With the user/customer's ability to change providers at the click of a button, companies must find ways to differentiate their offerings and personalize their business transactions to meet customer needs. Additionally, companies must ensure that the user experience is satisfying and that their sites' design does not inhibit the user's desired outcome (purchasing, enrolling, retrieving information, etc.) or loyalty ratios will suffer, driving up customer acquisition costs. The bar for doing it right is rising each day.
With almost all web-based applications, business managers do not have the ability to react to market conditions with real-time control. Tools that provide managers with accessible and useful insights into their Internet/intranet processes are desperately needed. Real dollars are being spent, and the investments that they are supporting need to be managed and monitored with tools that make the automated systems and sites “real” to managers.
Business systems in general have suffered through lack of reporting facilities that are accessible, usable, and understandable to key managers and executives. This lack of visibility costs companies worldwide an incalculable amount of wasted expenditure and lost opportunity.
Human beings have an incredible facility for visual pattern recognition that far transcends their ability to glean the same patterns from data formatted in textual reports. When they are visually enabled, they can explore vast amounts of data, rapidly to identify patterns and opportunities that were previously unnoticed. Typical reports and periodic updates that pervade conventional decision support and executive information systems, however, are tabular, static and difficult to interpret.
More recently, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become available as a tool for providing e-business analytics. OLAP is a category of software technology that enables analysts, managers and executives to gain insight into data through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of possible views of information that has been transformed from raw data to reflect the real dimensionality of the enterprise as understood by the user. OLAP functionality is characterized by dynamic multi-dimensional analysis of consolidated enterprise data supporting end user analytical and navigational activities including: calculations and modeling applied across dimensions, through hierarchies and/or across members; trend analysis over sequential time periods; slicing subsets for on-screen viewing; drill-down to deeper levels of consolidation; reach-through to underlying detail data; rotation to new dimensional comparisons in the viewing area. OLAP is typically implemented in a multi-user client/server mode and offers consistently rapid response to queries, regardless of database size and complexity. OLAP helps the user synthesize enterprise information through comparative, personalized viewing, as well as through analysis of historical and projected data in various ‘what-if’ data model scenarios. Typically, OLAP is facilitated by an OLAP Server that processes the data for a client application that presents data and helps users define queries.
As noted above, OLAP enables a user to easily and selectively extract and view data from different points-of-view. For example, a user can request that data be analyzed to: (i) display a spreadsheet showing all of a company's beach ball products sold in Florida in the month of July; (ii) compare revenue figures with those for the same products in September; and then (iii) see a comparison of other product sales in Florida in the same time period. To facilitate this kind of analysis, OLAP data is typically stored in a multidimensional database. Whereas a relational database can be thought of as two-dimensional, a multidimensional database considers each data attribute (such as product, geographic sales region, and time period) as a separate “dimension.” OLAP software can locate the intersection of dimensions (all products sold in the Eastern region above a certain price during a certain time period) and display them. Attributes such as time periods can be broken down into sub-attributes.
Notwithstanding the enhanced querying, calculation, and indexing functionality of OLAP systems, and their multidimensional access to data, such systems still lack the capability to efficiently and effectively measure, manage, evaluate, monitor, and optimize current transactional, process automation, content distribution, web-based type business systems. Presently available OLAP systems are incapable of providing the required business intelligence information in a form that is effectively usable and meaningful, and in a time frame that enables effective utilization of the information. Moreover, such systems do not have the capability to interactively visualize or analyze the business information and data collected, and to process, distribute, analyze, and visualize such business information in real-time.
Consequently, there is a need for a business analytics system that is capable of interactive visualization and analysis of business information and data, that can collect, process, distribute, analyze, and visualize such business information and data in real-time. There is a need for such a system that is capable of providing reports that are visual, interactive, and easy to understand, thereby taking advantage of human beings' natural ability for visual pattern recognition. There is a need for providing actionable intelligence from transactional or other process automation systems, content distribution systems and databases. More specifically, there is a need to allow users to visually explore vast amounts of data in real-time by pointing and clicking to make queries, and to select data in, and present it through, multi-dimensional graphical representations. In addition, there is a need to provide actionable intelligence to a user to allow the user to 1) evaluate the usability of the site; 2) assess modifications to the site; 3) improve conversion rates; 4) improve site performance; 5) improve customer satisfaction; 6) optimize marketing campaigns; 7) reduce customer session loss; and 8) forecast the potential return on a campaign or site change and prioritize investments.